The
International Space Station Expedition Four Crew Interviews with
Flight Engineer Daniel Bursch.

Our
Crew Interviews with Dan Bursch, Flight Engineer 2 on the fourth
permanent expedition to the International Space Station. As you
prepare to embark on a five-month-long space flight, Dan, tell me
how you see the mission-what is it that you and your crewmates are
being sent to orbit to accomplish?

A: I think one of the main goals of the International Space Station
is to put a permanent human presence in space. Another main goal,
which is just in the name itself, is "International" Space Station.
A lot of the work that we've done in the last four years has been
centered around working with primarily the Russians but also the
other international partners, and that by far, to me personally,
has probably been one of the biggest challenges for the International
Space Station. So, as far as personally going on this mission, one
of the things to do is to myself to try to mentally prepare myself
for the four-, five-, six-month mission. With my experience in the
Navy I think of it as kind of like a naval deployment, where we
were gone anywhere from four to eight months at a time, but it's
also different in that we're not, it's as if we're doing a whole
naval deployment, but we're only doing it with the two other people
in our bunkroom or in our stateroom, which is different in itself,
and on occasion getting visitors from the Earth. So mentally, I
think it's, the preparation for it is different. As far as the mission
itself, one of my goals is to take over from Expedition Three, hopefully
put the station in an even better condition at the end of our increment
when Expedition Five comes up, to have the station in an even better
condition than it was before-not only just the condition of, including
all the equipment that was up there, but also the added equipment
that will come up during our increment, whether it's the experiments,
S0 truss, or MBS that comes up on the UF-2- and to, basically, how
you would want to take over from anybody. It was kind of like a
watch, standing watch in the Navy, is that you want to take over
something, you have control over it, and you want to put it in even
better condition than when you found it at the end. It's to complete
every experiment that the ground wants me to do; I know we'll have
maintenance while we're up there; to complete all, installing all
the other equipment that comes on board; and also, number one personally
for me, has been to make sure my family makes it through not only
the training, the long time away that we've been having to spend
away from our family, training for this mission, to make sure they
make it, they make it through the mission. And for me, personally,
that's number one.

How
do you see yourself as you go off to do this? Are you a space explorer,
or are you a scientist; are you something else?

I think the
only way that I can think to answer that is a little of everything.
It's almost like a jack-of-all-trades. I mean, there'll be some
days where I will be a scientist perhaps… certainly not at
the qualifications as you would, more of, on an operator side for
instance, some of the experiments we're doing are in growing plants,
and there's one experiment I'll actually be harvesting plants; there's
another, that same experiment, I may be pollinating plants. And
then the next day I may be repairing a box that breaks on space
station that needs to be repaired. I may actually be doing some
testing on some equipment. The next day a shuttle may come visit
and then I'll perhaps position myself at the robotics workstation
and working with another shuttle crewmember or one of my crewmates
on station and working to install a new piece of hardware. There
may be a day where we come up and we have to go outside for some
reason to either repair something or get ready for another mission
or finish up some work that wasn't done. And throughout all of this,
we'll be doing the same day-to-day routines that anybody would do,
and that's getting up-I'll be in microgravity and, while we're floating
at the time, but it's putting in my contacts, washing up, eating,
eating breakfast, reading mail, talking to my family, writing notes
to my family, and so it's a little bit of everything. And, it's
kind of hard to, in a sense, I guess, you know, I'd like to think
that we're exploring, but a lot of the exploration has already been
done and that is in working with countries so closely, especially
countries that used to be former enemies, and to me, that's exploration
in itself.

You've
got to have a lot of different talents and achievements in order
to be picked to do this in the first place. How did you get to be
a guy who was "astronaut material"? What was your career
path to reach it?

Actually, my
first recollection of when I started thinking about going to space
or becoming an astronaut, I was in a summer camp and we were listening
on the radio when we first walked on the moon. And I just remember
that moment-if you remember moments in your life, and certain special
moments like that-and I just remember thinking that that was really
just, it was so hard to believe that something like that was happening.
And, I thought, well, I hope perhaps maybe I can do that someday.
And to tell you the truth I never really gave it another thought
until after I was out of the Naval Academy; I remember my brother
telling me while I was at the Naval Academy, him saying something
to the effect that, hey, you know Dan, you ought to be an astronaut.
You know, and I just, I kind of laughed at it as something that,
you know, was probably my older brother just giving me a hard time.
But, and I never thought about it again until I went to the Navy
Test Pilot School as a navigator-I was a Naval flight officer in
the Navy, and I was a navigator in the A-6 Intruder-and I went to
Test Pilot School and didn't learn to test airplanes but let's say
the avionics or the black boxes that are in the airplanes. And there
I learned that there were several graduates of the Navy Test Pilot
School that became astronauts, and also we had a field trip while
we were at the Navy Test Pilot School and we actually came down
here to Johnson Space Center and we visited - had briefings with the Astronaut Office, met some of the astronauts, and it was there
I first really got interested in and thought that this is something
that I really want to do. And it all started back in about 1984,
when I first started applying, and wasn't accepted 'til 1990.

In
the course of all of that, from watching the moonwalks all the way
up to being accepted to today, are there certain people that you
recognize have been, or maybe still are, the biggest influences
in your life, in you getting where you are today?

I think number
one, as anybody would, most people would probably say, probably
my parents encouraging me to do anything that I wanted to do. They
were always, when I was growing up, wanted me to try different things,
and at times prodding me to do things that I otherwise thought maybe
I couldn't do, and so they were certainly encouraging. I think any
astronaut that comes to the Johnson Space Center and works with all the great people that we have here certainly there's key figures
that stand out. I think John Young is probably just about everybody's idol in the Astronaut Office, just somebody who's done as much as
he has including walking on the moon, is just [an] incredible feat,
and first to fly in the space shuttle-I mean, it's, I think everybody
in the Office kind of looks up to him and I still cherish any time
that I'm able to fly with him. But those were probably the people
that most influenced how I try to live my life.

Of
course, the invaluable assistance of your big brother…

Oh, that's
true, that's true.

Both
you and Carl Walz have three previous space missions to your credit,
which gives you a combined experience of about two months in space.
And, now you're looking at a single flight that will keep you up
there for about five months. What do you see as the big differences
in the ways that you've gone about preparing yourself for such a
different kind of mission?

I think early
on, well, maybe after about a year of all the traveling and training
Carl and I were talking about it with Yury and I think we all came
to the realization that this is, the mission is different. And Yury
was, has been very helpful and because of his experience already
on Mir and the six months that he spent on space station, of letting
us know that it is different. And the best way I think I can, or
the best analogy that I think I can come up with, it's kind of like
the difference between a sprint and a long-distance race. I mean,
this is, it really is a marathon in some respects-and it's probably
a short marathon compared to what we will do in the future when
we go to Mars and other planets-but I think it's a marathon in that
physically not so much physically but mentally, how you need to
think about it is that, on a space shuttle mission, most missions
these days are about eleven days long on the space shuttle, maybe
twelve, and some have been much longer than that, however, in general
it's kind of when you think of a space shuttle mission, it's kind
of like finals week, where you pack everything into a week or a
week-and-a-half or two weeks, and everything is so critical and
it's kind of like you get ready and it's a burst of energy and you
do it. With a long-duration mission I think it's going to be more
of, like a marathon, where it's going to be, we're going to have
to pace ourselves: we're going to have, we can't run at the same
pace that we're used to running on the space shuttle, and there'll
have to be times where we'll have to help each other out just to
say, hey, it's time for you to just take a break and sit by the
window, look out, and take some time; have some time to yourself.
It seems funny to say that because we'll have, we should have lots
of time to ourselves with only three people up there in the same
environment but, really in a lot of respects, I think it will be
much to where it's kind of, we'll have to pace ourselves. However,
there'll be times when a shuttle comes to visit, like 8A, and we'll
have six to eight days of very, very busy days of getting ready
for them to come, while they're docked, helping with the EVAs, helping
with installation of new equipment, and so it'll be times of, it'll
vary from very, being very slow to very fast, almost shuttle-like
pace, and then slowing down again. And what'll be different, also,
is that the weekends-I haven't quite figured out how that's going
to work; I know that on Saturday [it will] be a lighter duty, and
Sunday in most respects we'll have much of the day off, but I can't
imagine having the day off and not having anything to do 'cause
normally, you know, like here at home, my days off are, I always
have a list of things that need to be done around the house, and
maybe that's what I'll end up doing, I'll end up saying, OK, give
me things that need to be done, 'cause I just, I've run out of personal
time or I don't want to read a book right now, I want to do something.

You
mentioned the fact that the three of you have spent probably about
four years now studying and preparing for this mission. Do you think
having had that much time together to get ready will give you guys
an advantage in working together once you do get there?

I think just
from a language standpoint, that's been important because certainly
Yury's been taking English, we've been taking Russian for over four
years; that's been a big challenge. One of the advantages of having
a long training flow is that we haven't had I think some of the
pressures that, for instance, some of the shuttle or the Phase 1
[of] the space station, Phase 1 of [the] space station program with
Shuttle-Mir, how some of those astronauts and cosmonauts had, with
the quick the pressures that they had to learn a different language,
especially a different language like Russian, in such a short period
of time. It's also given us an advantage, I think, is that we learned
better to know the kind of moods that we are. I mean, Carl and I,
we flew our first flight together so we've known each other- and
also classmates-so we've known each other ever since we first reported
here on the same day. And for Yury it's been interesting because
it's not only getting to know him personally but there's also the
cultural differences that you learn: that there may be certain customs…or
traditions that we are accustomed to that they aren't and vice versa.
So we've been getting to know and through that you get to know…their
moods. It's almost, I wouldn't say it's certainly not exactly a
marriage, but it's pretty close because there are times when, in
fact, we need to be apart. I mean, there's some times when you just,
you spend so much time together where you just want to be by yourself,
and I think we're going to, I think there, we have learned that
there's, those times do happen, and so we need to give each other
space at times, too. So, in those, I think that has been an advantage
in working so long together. Again, having a marathon type of attitude
towards the mission.

As
I mentioned, your title on this mission is Flight Engineer; tell
me what it is that you will do in space. In general, what are your
responsibilities as a member of this crew?

Well, just
as in shuttle flights and just about as in any one task that any
team-whether it's baseball, football, soccer-that goes out to do,
everybody has their own position and their own responsibilities
because it's kind of the definition of a team is [that] not any
one person can do it themselves, so early on we kind of broke up
the, or divided up the responsibilities of the crew. Yury, for a
Commander it's kind of, it's different in that he's responsible
for everything, so it's kind of hard in, but there are certain areas,
he's tended to specialize more on the Russian segment and some of
the Russian systems, especially because he had the experience on
Mir and a lot of the systems, some of the systems are similar to
Mir. Carl, with his experience on, for EVAs, kind of became the
de facto and natural kind [of] lead for any type of EVA activities
that we would do especially on the U.S. segment or using the U.S.
spacesuit, or the EMU. Yury's kind of, is more of an expert on the
Russian Orlan, or the Russian spacesuit. Myself with my experience,
I, and it was, I [gratefully] took it on was working with the space
station Remote Manipulator System or what we affectionately call
the Big Arm, or the SSRMS. And that has been my prime responsibility
and my prime system. There's also systems on the station that we
divide up. Me personally, I'm listed as prime for the Thermal Control
System on station and also for the command and data handling system,
so the computers on space station, and I'm also prime for a crew
medical officer but one of the things to keep in mind with only
a crew of three everybody kind of has to know a little bit about
everything. So it's not quite as divided as maybe some of the tasks
are for the shuttle, where perhaps only two people have been trained,
out of the, out of say a crew of seven or six or seven, have been
trained on a system, pretty much all of us on space station have
been trained as operators on any system. But we give us, give each
other maybe "prime" designation to say, if a maintenance
action needs to be done or if some problem comes up, chances are
all three of us may work on it; however each one of us has tried
to specialize in a certain part of the system to take care of that.
And as far as payloads go some of the experiments that I have-and
maybe we'll talk about them later-but there's, we divided up the
experiments. Part of the reasons were that we had a lot of payload
training to do and we, and it usually is associated with each experiment
had its own amount of time so we split up the experiments as well
so each of us has their own experiments that we're responsible for.
So we kind of had a big list of all the tasks and everything, of
all the equipment and all the things that we need to do on space
station, and we just basically divided them up.

Let's
start at the beginning. You're going to arrive at the station on
the shuttle Endeavour when Dom Gorie and his crew bring you up.
Now, the first time stations crews exchanged, they did it one at
a time over several days; the second time the exchange was made,
in August, all three crewmembers moved over on the same day. Tell
me how you guys are going to do it, and what's the rationale for
doing it one way or the other?

I don't fully
understand why the first and second Expedition crews did it over
several days. I think it had to do with some of the timeline constraints
they had of when the hatches could be open and when they could be
closed, and I think they had several periods of time where they
had to, because the shuttle was going to a lower pressure- at that
time we didn't have an airlock on space station yet so we were doing
the EVAs or space walks, out of the space shuttle, so the shuttle,
for their prebreathe, had to bring down their atmosphere down to
10.2-well, when you do that, we had to close the hatches. And in
order to take advantage of the handover time we did exchange crews
one by one and then closed hatches, and we did it that way. The
advantage is that you get the handover done and you can use some
of this time, where otherwise you wouldn't be able to do it if you
didn't exchange crews. The disadvantage is that there would be,
there is a potential, if something were to happen where the shuttle
had to undock for some reason, then you have a mixed crew on station.
And we never close the hatches between the space station or the
shuttle until we have the correct…the seats in the Soyuz are molded
to our body, so they're specifically-and the suits-are specifically
for each astronaut or cosmonaut in the Soyuz spacecraft. So our
rescue vehicle or lifeboat on the space station is a Soyuz. So until
you have your specific, and we call it seat kit, but until you have
your specific kit installed, then you cannot use that Soyuz spacecraft.
So that's one of the major handover items is to exchange those seat
kits. And what we realized, and I think what Frank Culbertson realized,
too, as the Commander of Expedition Three, is that he wanted to
do that exchange of the crews as quickly as possible such that,
if we can do it in one day then we minimize that window of time
where we would be vulnerable to having a split crew. And I think
having a split crew in itself isn't that bad, but it means that
you know, some people will be spending a much longer time up there
than they thought; also all the clothing, provisioning that comes
up is meant for the new crew that's coming up-it physically may
not even fit the previous crew up there. So we just, I think we
gradually decided that if we can do it in one day and exchange these
kits quickly, then at least physically, if something were to happen,
we may not have completed the handover as far as talking of, about
all the systems and the things that we need to complete a full handover,
but physically we can separate the crews and have the new crew with
their kits installed in the Soyuz and ready to go.

Let's
talk about handover. There's time scheduled throughout the docked
phase of this mission for handover, and that's not just a sightseeing
tour I take it. Give us a sense of what the Expedition Three and
Expedition Four crews will be doing and talking about during that
period.

I recently
talked to Jim Voss who recently came back from…he was on Expedition
Two, and he put it a way that I thought was pretty interesting.
He says that in handover, you kind of have kind of like three, if
you can think of it, three sets of notes or questions that you have
that you need to hand over between the crews. One set is kind of
an ongoing set of items that the ground keeps track of, maybe a
system we're operating in a different mode than we've been trained
or that we have been doing before or there's a certain way, these
are some…a way that the system has…it's had a failure so this is
how we're operating it instead, we're operating it in this degraded
mode or in a different mode. So it's specific things about the systems
that we know that are operating right now and that will probably
remain the same at least at the beginning of our increment. So that
is one set of notes or questions. Another set might be just personal
notes of, from Expedition 3 that Frank and Mikhail or Vladimir will
have of notes that they have that they've seen that maybe surprised
them when they got on station, that they didn't realize that were
different, or different from what they trained, or maybe tips that
they can give us that, hey, when you operate this system watch out
for this because this caught me a couple of times, or make sure
you do this, or certain, and it could range from day-to-day operations
or it could be something very specific that they may even have late
in their handover just to say that it's not quite that important,
but something to note. So that's the second thing. So the first
thing was, you know, the list of things that we know that the ground
kind of keeps a running tally of, or track of; second would be the
off-going crew, or the down crew, sometimes what we call them, the
crew coming off, and they have some of their personal notes; and
then after we can see maybe those first two notes, we'll probably
come up with our own questions, or maybe even after reading the
first list we'll come up with some first questions as to, you know,
have you found this to be something as a problem, have you found,
you know, how have you configured the communication when you're
operating the robotic arm or have you thought about how you're going
to configure the communication when the other two people, let's
say the shuttle's not there and the other two people are outside,
have you thought, are you going to do anything different with the
communications and it may just be personal questions of how, you
know, did you have enough supplies in this particular area, so it's
a list of our own personal questions. So, through those three lists
I think we'll, that's kind of how we conduct the handover. Another
thing that we're trying to do is some of the tasks, let's say when
we go up to space station, if there's a robotic task that we need
to do with the Big Arm, with the station arm, what we're trying
to do is in general to plan both the up crew and the down crew to
do that task, because while we're working together at the robotic
workstation that kind of serves as a time to handover because as
we're working together, doing a task, then while we're doing it
the experienced, more experienced crew, that's on board right now
they can point out some things that might be different than we saw
either in the simulator or during training or what we were briefed
or what we saw up in Canada when we were training for the arm.

You
made a reference to it before, and I want to see if you can expand
on it a little bit and give us a better sense of what you expect
day-to-day life to be like as a member of a space station crew.
Do, will there be such a thing as a "normal" day on board
ISS?

I think, to
tell you the truth, it's really hard for me to imagine because,
again, going back to the whole pace of a shuttle mission, all my
experience has to do with shuttle and the shuttle mission you know
day-by-day there's every Flight Day where you knew that, OK, this
was Launch Day and you had to do post-insertion and you were really
busy and reconfiguring your spacecraft into a research vehicle instead
of a rocket. So each Flight Day almost, in ten to eleven Flight
Days, you could almost memorize by each Flight Day the major task
that was going to be completed, and I think that's going to be,
it's going to be different on station because I think there will
be, except when a shuttle comes up to visit, such as when 8A, when
STS-110 comes up to visit-on 8A when they deliver the S0 truss,
then again we'll be back to each specific Flight Day we'll have
a primary task that they'll be doing, whether it includes, most
days it includes robotics and [an] EVA so each Flight Day we can
track like that. Other than that, I think the days on space station,
what they're trying to do is to keep the timelines somewhat flexible
in that we have a list of items that we can do when we think we
are able, or the ground will send us a list of things to do, sometimes
they call it a task list, sometimes they call it a job jar, and
if you can think of it, it's a jar of things to do and it's kind
of at our discretion. And that's one of the things that they found
out from the Phase 1 program is that it was, it gave the crew, and
whether it was psychologically or just, it was better for scheduling-wise
to give the crew some autonomy in determining their work schedule,
their workday. So it's kind of like if you have a list of things
to do for the day or you're on your, a daily planner of things that
you want to get done, and they're usually in a list of priority
and you can choose those things and pick the times that would be
good- no, I think it would be better to work out right now, but
right after I do that I can start this task that the ground asked
me to do. So I think day-to-day routine certainly every day would
probably even when the shuttle's there, it'll basically be, wake
up, get ready to go have some breakfast, read the morning mail,
and have some time together to talk, to talk about the upcoming
day, what do we have planned for the day. So regular things like
that, whether it's personal hygiene or reading or getting up-to-date
is going to be somewhat normal. And then there'll be some weeks
that I think the pace will definitely change: it'll probably be
highest, the pace will probably be toughest or a quickest pace when
the shuttle is visiting and we're, we have mated, when we're, the
shuttle's docked and we're doing operations together and involving
many different systems. Certainly the, hopefully the pace will be
much lower, let's say, if the shuttle isn't there but even, let's
say, if the shuttle's not there yet, we have an EVA scheduled, that
whole week will probably involve time when we're getting ready for
the EVA, time when we're actually doing the EVA, and then after
the EVA reconfiguring systems. So the pace is probably going to
be all over the place.

You
do have space walks scheduled, but a little ways into your increment.
The first few weeks, the schedule really seems to have your attention
to be on science. In a broader sense, how do you see the space station's
overall scientific mission being advanced by the work that's going
to be done during your time on board?

Well the U.S.
Laboratory has already been, been up there, and as each shuttle
comes up some of the equipment in the shuttle and most of the time
in the MPLM in the logistics module when it comes up some of the
experiments will have test sections or parts of them replaced or
have new samples that will be replaced in the experiments. Some
of the experiments will be completely new-we'll be bringing up new
entire racks of experiments, some of them will be parts of the rack,
let's say, in an EXPRESS rack where we'll have smaller protein crystal
growth experiments that we'll be replacing. So, in general the experiments
that I'll be working with, one is called ADVASC, it's an advanced
astro culture and experiment; that will be growing plants. One of
their goals is to see if they can actually grow soybean plants and
actually produce seeds in a microgravity environment. Plants, one
of the main reasons that we're interested in growing plants in space
is that for when we go to Mars a lot of our food that we consume
we'll be making ourselves on the spacecraft because that can save
a lot of weight, we can reuse a lot of the water that's used, we
can, the plants can help us to scrub out the CO2 in the atmosphere,
so there's a lot of benefits that can be gained by growing our own
plants not only to, for the consumption, for the food, but also
for scrubbing the atmosphere. However there's a lot of challenges
in that a lot of time plants rely on a day-to-day cycle of light;
they also rely on the nutrients they get; they also rely on gravity
in knowing to where their roots can grow. Also in some of these,
in a lot of these experiments, another experiment I'm doing is called
the biomass processing system-another experiment that will be looking
at growing plants-and its main goal is not so much in producing,
it is, in a way, is in producing the plants but also in testing
the enclosure that it's using. It has special enclosures that there's
a lot of other gases that plants produce that have to be scrubbed
out of the atmosphere. The atmosphere for the plants has to be much
more closely controlled even more so than the environment that our
environmental control life support system on station controls for
us. So it has to control the humidity, it has to control the light,
it has to control the amount of CO2 that's in the atmosphere, the
oxygen that circulates through the plants, and so that type of enclosure
in itself just producing the machines that can grow these plants
is a challenge. And that's one of the main goals of that experiment.

You
mentioned a couple of experiments; during your time there, there
are going to be experiments in, like, four broad disciplines.

Right, right.
We also have experiments in protein crystal growth, and the protein
crystal growth is important as many people have mentioned before,
but basically proteins and amino acids are the building blocks of
our bodies, and one of, and a lot of diseases that affect human
life use, in a bad way sometimes, use these proteins and fix themselves
to proteins. One of the ways that we can combat disease is that
if we can figure out the structure of some of these proteins we
can engineer new drugs, and it's not by hit-or-miss-most of the
time the way that drugs are produced these days, or kind of trial
and error, where we test a drug, we mix it together, and we see
if it works or not. The new field, and it's not quite so new anymore,
is in protein crystal growth, is that if we can grow crystals of
protein larger and more perfect in space, because we don't have
the convection that we have on Earth because of gravity, and we
don't have the mixing that goes on, these proteins tend to grow
bigger and larger. And if we can, we can then observe the structure
of those proteins, then we can engineer a drug. This isn't a trial
and error, this would, if we know the structure of the drug, and
the way we know the structure is to bombard it with X rays, and
by the diffraction that comes out of these crystals, then we can
determine a lattice or the structure of that protein, and then basically
engineer a drug, design a drug, on a computer and produce it so
that, let's say the point where this disease was fixing itself to
this protein, then we can design a drug that will fix itself to
that point and not allow the disease to attack that part of the
protein. In other areas, it's materials: we have an experiment called
Experiment for the Physics of Colloids in Space. And a colloid is,
it took me a while to understand what a colloid is, but an example
of a colloid is something that, if you can think of anything that
you need to mix before you use it-one would be orange juice, one
would be paint, is an example; sometimes coffee can be a colloid
as well-and if you can think of it, it's particles suspended in
some other liquid or medium. And colloids, the physics of colloids,
what they want to look at is, sometimes when you get these particles
suspended in the solution, they then tend to, they can start to
form larger crystals themselves. And what they want to understand
is, without gravity in space, how do these crystals tend to form,
and then how can we observe their structure. And this particular
experiment actually has the different solutions, these colloidal
solutions, in a little carousel that will be moving around in the
experiment itself, and it'll actually use a laser to shine light
through, it has a transparent part of the experiment, to shine a
laser through it, and then to look at the diffraction pattern of
those, of that laser, and also it will be taking pictures at the
same time of those crystals themselves and to see how they form.
And I don't fully understand the use of those type of materials,
but what I've been used, that they can be used in the future for
filters, if they can grow some of these proteins, so it's a whole
new idea of materials that might be used in the future, whether
on Earth or in space.

We
made mention a moment ago that you've been training to do a space
walk with your Commander out of the Docking Compartment of the station;
it'll be your first ever space walk. Tell me about the jobs that
are on the schedule-why are you and Yury going outside?

OK. We have,
basically there are three types of equipment that we'll be taking
out with us, and we'll be in the Orlan, or the Russian spacesuits.
Yury and I are supposed to take out a couple of, in Russian they're
called ukladka, and it's basically an assembly or a packet of things
to bring with us. One is a set of deflectors that will be installed
on the aft end, or back end, of the Service Module. And these are
deflectors that will go over the thrusters, where the thrusters
fire on the Service Module, and that's to protect outside of the
Service Module and other things on space station, it's to better
deflect the materials that come out of those thrusters, from affecting
other parts of space station. The second group of items we'll be
taking out are experiments, and these are little, usually they're
like little cassettes, or little boxes, that have, that you attach
to an outside portion of space station. Then we will open it and
carefully not want to touch the material that's inside of the boxes,
so it's kind of like a box that you open up and inside will be different
materials that are designed to be exposed to atomic oxygen and other
things in space to see their, the reactions and several months later
there'll be a space walk to go back and to retrieve those experiments
and eventually bring them back to Earth. And so our main job's to
go out and to install them-there'll be some that actually had already
been previously installed, and our job will be to remove those and
bring those back. The third part of equipment that we'll be installing
are some ham radio antennas that will be installed on the back end
of the Service Module. There're four antennas that we'll be installing,
kind of at a…equidistance apart.

Within
a week or so of that, Yury is to make another space walk with Carl.
When they go outside, what is your job inside?

Inside [the]
main job is to help them during their walk to make sure that…that
to go through the procedure, to keep track of them, to keep the
cameras, to use whatever cameras we can on station to monitor their
progress; if they have any questions about how something's supposed
to be installed or moved or what the next procedure is, I'll facilitate
that-they will also have communication with the ground. I'll also,
in helping them as well, I'll be trying to maintain monitoring all
the systems on board station. Of course the ground is helping us
as well, and it gets back to a team, is that we're all working as
a team with the main goal is producing what and monitoring and to
getting done what they want to do on their space walk. Their, one
of their main goals is to reposition it's called a Strela, or it's
essentially, it's a small crane, a manual crane, that's used to
move people around station, and they'll be moving that from one
end of space station to the other. And so in general, keeping the
communications on; monitoring their progress; if there was any type
of emergency, then it would be in a different, I'd be in a different
mode to help them get in as quick as possible; and then, if need
be, to repressurize a compartment when they come back in. And to
communicate with the ground and if anything were to happen on station
that keep them informed.

Now,
as we talk there is still some discussion of adding another space
walk or two later on in your mission, after the 8A mission, which
would be space walks done out of the American airlock. What would
be on the agenda for these space walks, if they occur?

Essentially,
there's three I guess in, human beings we all like to think [in]
groups of three, but there's three kind of groups of things, main
ideas, that we could, would probably come up. There may be a list
of, there's a list of things that we want to accomplish during 8A;
if for some reason that some of the space walks take longer than
usual, if they weren't able to finish all the things that they wanted
to during those space walks when the space shuttle was docked, that-all
the tasks are prioritized you can bet that, let's say, on the docked
time when 8A comes up all the space walks they do are prioritized
such that the first EVA's going to do the most important tasks and
so on, and so by the last EVA some of it will be cleanup, some of
it will be preparing for the next mission that comes up-and some
of those will be things that if they just don't, they weren't able
to get done during 8A maybe that'll fall into something that we
need to do. It may be as simple as moving equipment outside, it
may be as simple as taking equipment out and getting it ready for
the next mission that comes up. So that's one group of things, is
to do some things that we already know we have to get done to do.
Other groups of items could be maintenance type. Let's say if a
box outside needs replacement, then we would go outside and replace
that box, or it needs to do some other type of repair work, we would
go out and do that. So that's kind of a task that we somewhat train
for but [we're] not exactly sure what box will need to be replaced.
And the other task that might come up would be, let's say, not tasks
that weren't done on a previous mission but, let's say, it just
came up that we found out that UF-2, before they come up, they really
want something done before they come up and do a space walk that
they want done. And so, that would be, again, to pre-position perhaps
some equipment and get ready for them to come up.

Let's
talk about the shuttle visit you know you're going to receive, the
assembly mission 8A, which delivers the S0 truss and the Mobile
Transporter. For starters, give us a brief description of what those
components are, and what their importance is in the assembly of
the station.

One thing that's
really interesting about 8A and bringing up the S0 truss is that
we already know that there's been a tremendous amount of work and
successful work that's been done with the Big Arm, or the SSRMS.
This mission, I think, will raise the bar even higher, because this
will be a mission, will be the first time where we actually have
people on the space station arm and using the space station arm
to position people around to do different tasks on the S0, which
I'll describe right now. The S0, basically, is if you think of it
in two ways not only is it the first structural cross-element of
the truss-if you remember seeing space station, it has a longitudinal
axis [that] has most of the modules that are lined up, and crossways,
if you see pictures of assembly complete, you see the solar arrays
at the end of this big latticework of metal, and that's what we
call the truss-the S0 is the first segment that comes up that is
crossways on the Lab. And so structurally it's kind of like the
backbone of the truss that will be installed on the Lab. Second
of all, the S0 will bring up some equipment on board that will allow
the American segment, or American side, of the space station to
determine its own attitude, and also to determine its rate. Right
now we have computers on the American segment that can control the
attitude of station, but we get all of our attitude data, meaning
how the space station is positioned in space and where it's positioned
in space, from the Russian segment. So the Russian segment provides
us that information. It'll be the first time that we'll be able
to do that by ourselves on space station. It'll have a GP, one of
the things it'll have are GPS antennas that will be able to not
only determine a state vector or a position and a velocity and acceleration
in space, but also an attitude of space station while it's flying.
So if you think of it structurally and also the avionics or the
black boxes that, the other equipment that will come up on S0. Right
now there are four space walks scheduled for, in the installation
of the S0 truss, and if you think of a big picture, any time you
install something, in general we're going to be using the Big Arm,
so myself and Ellen Ochoa will be grappling the S0 truss in the
space shuttle payload bay picking it up out of the payload-and it
basically takes up just about the entire payload bay of the shuttle-pick
it up, move it over to the port side, and eventually install it
on the top of the Lab. And then there'll be some preliminary mechanical
connections that are made just to hold it temporarily basically,
on space station. The first space walk-and actually they'll be waiting
while we do that, while we are in, installing the S0 truss we'll
actually have the two space walkers Steve Smith and Rex Walheim,
will be waiting in the airlock while we do that and waiting for
their "go" that it's temporarily installed, and then they
go out the hatch. And there's some, there's some what we call struts,
but these are more, these are to better structurally attach the
S0 truss to the Laboratory we have these struts, and there's four
struts that basically are attached. There're two in the front and
two in the back of the S0 that go to the Lab, and those have to
be attached. Right now, the exact order of what they do first, but
if you can think of it in general, we have mechanical connections
that need to be made to, to fix the S0 truss to the Lab; there's
also umbilicals that need to be connected, and these are the for
power to some of the equipment that we have on the S0 truss, it's
also data to some of the computers that we have in the S0 truss,
there's also video that we'll have, video channels that will eventually
go to the Mobile Transporter and to the Mobile Base System that
comes up on a later mission. So it's basically fixing the S0 truss
to get it to where then space walkers can climb all over the S0
truss wherever they want to without any danger of moving it, and
also to get all the connections that we need. There's a time limit
in attaching the S0 truss, because there's equipment, once we take
it out of the payload bay, we undo a remote umbilical that powers
some of this equipment while it's in the space shuttle payload bay;
once we take it out of the payload bay then there's a clock that
starts ticking that says we need to get power to this equipment
before or else the S, we have the chance of losing some of the equipment
on S0. So that's another constraint that we have to get these umbilicals
attached.

Are
you going to be busy running the station arm for all four of the
space walks?

What we did
is we're splitting up much like I said before. In any type of team,
you split up the responsibilities and that's what we've done. My
main responsibility will be working the robot arm and working with
Ellen on installation of the S0 and EVA 1, which will be on the
same day, and then EVA 3. Carl's main responsibility will be working
the arm, working EVA 2 and EVA 4. And when we're not working the
arm, our responsibility will be helping the space walkers get in
and out of the airlock on space station.

After
that mission's done, later on in your flight, you are going to be
on hand to greet a taxi crew that's going to bring a new Soyuz spacecraft
to the station. What activities occur on board the station while
the taxi crew is there, other than swapping seat liners so that
they can take the old one home?

Right. A lot
of it depends upon when they come up. If they come up during a time
when we have other things scheduled, I think generally what they'll
try to do is, we'll have the taxi crew, will most likely have their
own schedule or list of tasks that they want to do themselves; some
of the things we'll be doing together. Certainly it'll be great
having another crew visiting and we'll be able to share stories,
share meals together. And so they will probably have a, some of
the timeline we'll be doing things together, but most of the timeline
they will probably have some of their own events that they need,
that they want to accomplish because they've trained on some experiments,
usually in addition to whatever experiments that will already be
ongoing. And we'll be continuing to do the experiments that we already
have on board space station.

It's
a very busy time for the three of you during your time up there.
As we talk about that today, it's been roughly a year since the
first permanent residents of the ISS arrived on orbit. An awful
lot has happened in that year, and now we've gotten to the point
where we're swapping out crews without any trouble, conducting science
on board the station, and the station itself has been built up to
be virtually self-sufficient. Finally, Dan, give me your perspective,
your thoughts on where it is that you see the International Space
Station program taking us in the future-in the short term of your
mission and beyond, as well as in the long term.

I think I touched
on this in the beginning a little bit but to me, my personal feeling
is that a lot of the progress that we're making has, we're accomplishing
just working together with all the other countries building space
station. To have a permanent presence in space of humans in space,
is very important-it's going to be the only way that we can get
back to the moon and on to Mars. And on the other side, the international
side, the International Space Station, you know, to me the fact
that "international" is the first word in ISS is no coincidence.
I think that, to me, is one of the most important aspects of this
whole venture is learning to work together. There's so many cultural
differences that we have, and to me it's just, it's so important
that we continue to work together because as we've seen with space
station, I mean, there were a lot of doubts many years ago whether
we'd be able, ever be able to pull this off. I remember before the
launch of the FGB there [were] doubts of when it would launch, and
then it was the Service Module, when it will launch, and now in
the past year the rate has just been incredible-it almost, it's
almost like the floodgates have opened as far as putting space station
up there. And it's not to say that we're not going to have challenges
in the future-I think we're going to have big challenges on just
about every mission. When you look at every mission coming up, there's
something new that we're going to be doing, and some aspect that's
going to be new about space station. So, and as we do that we continue
to learn, we continue to grow, and as, and as well as all the experiments
that we do on space station itself. So, to me, personally, the international
aspect of the International Space Station is truly the most important
in where it's continue, we're going to continue to learn how to
work together.